Notes

Inspired by our March 2016 cover story by James Fallows, “How America Is Putting Itself Back Together,” readers share their best aerial photos from across the U.S. Submit your own via hello@theatlantic.com. (Please provide the location, the story behind the photo, and the largest file size you have. Horizontal photos with a bit of the plane visible—a wing, the edge of a window—are ideal. Terms and Conditions here.)

Looking toward Lancaster airport, in the Amish country of Pennsylvania, as it is drenched in a downpour.Deborah Fallows

Genuine thunderstorms, of the type that form a long line when a cold front is moving across the country into warmer, wetter air, or that pop up as isolated cloudbursts on summer afternoons, are weather perils that even big, powerful airliners must avoid. When you’re flying in thunderstormy conditions, you hear airline pilots asking controllers for re-routes around the storms. “New York Center, United 1234, we’ll need to go 30 degrees left to avoid these buildups.”

The updrafts and downdrafts of wind around a thunderstorm “cell” can be so powerful that small aircraft are supposed to fly at least 20 miles away from the storm’s edge to avoid being tossed up and down. But “non-convective” rain showers, those not from thunderstorms, are more benign. On a trip this past Wednesday from Eastport, Maine, all the way back to the Washington area in a little Cirrus, my wife Deb and I flew in rain for most of the journey. But the rain was falling from a flattish, non-stormy cloud layer far above us, and it spattered on the wings and windshield as we flew in clear skies at 4,500 feet. (For the aviation crowd: this whole trip was VFR and free of turbulence and clouds at 6,500, then 4,500, then 3,500 feet, KEPM to KGAI, with a fuel stop at KPSF.)

And sometimes we passed localized rain showers, always keeping a respectful distance. Here is how the area just over the Lancaster airport, in the heart of the Amish country of Pennsylvania, looked at about 4 p.m. on Wednesday, from 10 miles to the east, outside the rain. What looks like a cloud reaching all the way to the ground, off the plane’s wingtip, would have seemed to people in Lancaster to be a drenching downpour. The gray you see reaching from cloud to ground is rain.

From the ground, it’s hard to see or imagine weather other than what is affecting us at the moment. From a distance in the air you can see, godlike, the movement of different weather across the land.

Taken on a recent trip from GSO to MDW [Greensboro, North Carolina, to Chicago, Illinois], this photo shows the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal in northwest Indiana, including ArcelorMittal (originally Inland Steel), the Whiting BP (originally Amoco) refinery, etc. I grew up on the far South Side of Chicago, not far from here, in the ’70s and early ’80s, when the “rust belt” was beginning.

Lots of rust color—and conveyor belts in action—to be seen via satellite here, where the canal empties into Lake Michigan near the plume of steam in the background of Jim’s photo:

Here’s the latest from Jimmy Rollison, one of our ace photographers for the series, who’s provided stunning views over Monument Valley, Dinosaur National Monument, and the Continental Divide. This colorful one was captured over Duncan Mills, California. “It’s west of Sacramento,” he writes, “looking at the coastal range that separates the Sacramento Valley from the Napa Valley in a 1939 airplane.” Update from another reader, Frank:

That “1939 airplane” is a Beech Model 17 “Staggerwing” biplane, and I think it is the most beautiful single-engined propeller driven aircraft ever produced (although the Supermarine Spitfire is very closely competitive). The Staggerwing is, truly, Walter Beech’s masterpiece. Notice how the upper biplane wing is mounted aft of the lower, a rare feature called “negative wing stagger” that gives the airplane its unique appearance and grace.

Next time you are in DC, wander by the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall and make your way to the Golden Age of Flight gallery. Therein, a yellow Model 17 is suspended for your examination and admiration.

There were relict streams that once drained into the original Everglades that are now submerged due to sea level rise that took place over the last 2,000 years. Many archaeological sites, low-lying mounds, are present along these now submerged streams, sites that we were working on at the time of this trip. The area south of the lake is a low-lying plane with limestone bedrock barely two feet beneath the current ground surface. And it is only several feet above sea level. This picture shows a good view of a 2,000-year-old house mound located not far from one of the relict stream channels. One of the access roads for the sugar cane fields made a U-turn around it to avoid its destruction.

Bill flew all the way from East Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania, on this trip, and the archaeological sites near Clewiston, Florida, were his final destination. He also documented more recently built structures, from highways to horse tracks:

The first picture shows the magnificent Delaware Water Gap, where the Delaware River cuts through Kittatinny Mountain (along with I-80). I am flying over Pennsylvania, looking east towards the gap, which is in Warren County, NJ.

Here, I am crossing from South Carolina into Georgia, setting up to find, then land, at Plantation Airfield. Plantation is an old Army-Air Force training field with the typical triangular runway layout. Most of the fields from South Carolina down to Clewiston were once training fields first built in the early 1940s. Plantation was largely a duster field when I passed through. Little did I know that my engine was to quit after I crossed the Savannah River and had the field in sight. I landed it like a glider!

Here’s a shot of a horse race track near Ocala, Florida, which is a thoroughbred breeding area of note in the U.S. There were horse-racing tracks everywhere I looked in the Ocala area!

In our America by Air series we often focus on beautiful, wild landscapes—the places that can only be seen in their full glory from the air. But what strikes me most about Bill’s photos is the way they document the mundane, man-made features of America’s topography—like the interstate cutting through Kittatinny Mountain, as much a force in shaping our world as the river. And noticing all this human infrastructure has a practical benefit, too:

When I was flying back through Georgia, my horizon was occluded by haze, the interminable summer haze, and I realized that I was off course. So, using an old airmail pilot’s expression, I “buzzed” a water tower in a small town that I did not recognize. The tower had its name prominently displayed: Glenville, Georgia! Airmail pilots would “shoot the station,” meaning a railroad station, to determine where they were (they used road maps back then). Since I was trying to pay attention, I did not take a picture of the Glenville water tower, but when I crossed into South Carolina about an hour later, I snapped a shot of the prominent water tower in the small town of Allendale, South Carolina—which, of course, had the town’s name on it too! So, I was “shooting the tower,” so to say, as a form of navigation on the way back.

Hi. This is a view from a helicopter of a riverboat near Opryland in Nashville, TN [on the Cumberland River]. It was taken in February 2004 during a ferry flight from Seattle, WA to Newport News, VA. Hope this helps.

Indeed it does; Tennessee is on our dwindling list of states that haven’t been covered in America by Air. Only 13 remain now (CT, GA, ID, IN, IA, ME, MS, NM, ND, RI, TN, VT, WV), so if you have a good aerial view from one of those states, please shoot it our way. Once we get to zero, I’m thinking of a launching a similar series of photos outside the U.S.

By the way, here’s a satellite view showing how close Opryland is to the boat dock our reader flew over:

Google Maps

And if you’re wondering what our reader means by “ferry flight,” here’s a helpful definition: “delivery flights for the purpose of returning an aircraft to base, delivering a new aircraft from its place of manufacture to its customer, moving an aircraft from one base of operations to another or moving an aircraft to or from a maintenance facility for repairs, overhaul or other work.”

This photo was made in 2005 between Waterloo, Iowa, and the Minnesota border. That trip took me Japan and Korea to take photographs for Camp Adventure (youth camps/programs) sites on U.S. military bases.

I recall Mesaba Airlines (Northwest Airlink) flew Saabs then. The plane looks to be a turbo prop Saab 340A [photo here]. The 340A’s engine is above the wing and the shape of the rear of the engine seems to match the one in my photo. I enjoyed these short rides to Minneapolis. The turbo-props gained altitude quickly and you seldom lost sight of earth, which was always interesting to watch.

My photo was used for the cover of a Brother Trucker album called The Flyover. [“Des Moines-based roots-rockers Brother Trucker finally present another heaping helping of their literate, soulful and cinematic brand of earthy, ‘pan-Americana’ music.”] When I took the photo, Joni Mitchell’s “Amelia” came to mind: “I dreamed of 747s / Over geometric farms.”

One of our best reader contributors to our series, JimmyRollison, sends another great view:

Looking north after passing Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes National Monument [captured by an earlier reader photographer], one cannot miss seeing the “Continental Divide” that has been the inspiration for many many artists. [French poet and aviator] Antoine St. Exupery’s famous quote is best applied here on this delivery flight: “I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.”

Jimmy adds, “Did you ever wonder why the terminal at Denver Airport looks like it does?” He’s referring to this striking structure, the Jeppesen Terminal:

The first commercial flight at the new Denver International Airport lands shortly after 6 a.m. on February 28, 1995. (Reuters)

The form evokes the majestic snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains, Colorado’s international signature. Sustainably, the fabric roof provides considerable daylighting, and low heat absorption reduces build-up due to sunlight radiation. A survey by the American Institute of Architects ranked the terminal as #4 on its list of favorite American architectural landmarks, while Business Traveler magazine readers voted DIA the “Best Airport in North America” every year from, 2005-2010. As the largest structurally integrated tensile-membrane roof in the world, DIA is a memorable threshold welcoming all to Colorado and the West.

Hello again, Chris. I just happen to have an aerial photo of Burning Man, taken in the C180 from about a mile away looking down (from about 5500 AGL / 10,000 MSL) on the half circle that is Black Rock City. The scale of it is hard to imagine, but the diameter of the half circle is well over a mile.

I hope you have a great time at Burning Man this year, but be prepared for everything—heat, cold, dust storms, rain and mud—all in the same week. Then again, on some occasions it can be clear and mild!

If you’ve been out to Black Rock City and have any good advice for a first-timer, or just a good story to share, please drop me an email.

As I was reading up on Black Rock Desert just now, I came upon this eerie and captivating sight:

That vision of a mushroom trip is called Fly Geyser, and it was created by accident more than 50 years ago. From the Atlas Obscura entry on the natural-ish wonder:

In 1964 a geothermic energy company drilled a test well at the same site [of a nearby geyser]. The water they struck was that same 200 degrees. Hot, but not hot enough for their purposes. The well was supposedly re-sealed, but apparently it did not hold. The new geyser, a few hundred feet north of the original, robbed the first of its water pressure and the cone now lays dry.

This second geyser, known as Fly Geyser, has grown substantially in the last 40 years as minerals from the geothermal water pocket deposit on the desert surface. Because there are multiple geyser spouts, this geyser has not created a cone as large as the first, but an ever growing alien looking mound. The geyser is covered with thermophilic algae, which flourishes in moist, hot environments, resulting in the multiple hues of green and red that add to its out-of-this-world appearance.

Here’s a video of the geyser in action:

The 3,800-acre Fly Ranch upon which the geyser sits was actually just bought by the Burning Man Project in June. From the group’s news release:

Here’s the gist of it: Those who have been deeply affected by a Burning Man event or experience have often asked, “How can we bring this beyond the event?” “How can we make this really matter?” [...] As a year-round site, Fly Ranch has the potential to expand Burning Man Project’s activities and existing programs, as well as amplify Burning Man’s cultural impact into the wider world beyond Black Rock City.

Another reader with another amazing view adds another state to the series:

I see on your site that you don’t have a photo taken in Nevada. This is Pyramid Lake, about 30 miles north of Reno. The lake is out in the middle of the desert. I took the photo from a 1955 Cessna 180. (Sorry about the reflections in the window.)

Coincidentally I’m headed out to that part of the Nevada desert in less than a month, to attend Burning Man for the first time. If you happen to have a good aerial photo above Black Rock City, please send it our way.

Pyramid Lake is fed by the Truckee River, which is mostly the outflow from Lake Tahoe. The Truckee River enters Pyramid Lake at its southern end. Pyramid Lake has no outlet, with water leaving only by evaporation, or sub-surface seepage (an endorheic lake). The lake has about 10% of the area of the Great Salt Lake, but it has about 25% more volume. The salinity is approximately 1/6 that of sea water. …

Take some white vinegar to mix with your water to counteract the alkali when washing your feet, or anything that’s covered with the lake bed dust. Take foot cream or you may crack. Wash feet frequently.

Get a medium quality dust mask (one not too hot). I use swim goggles because they seal the best. Wear them around your neck at all times in case a dust storm blows, which happens all the time.

Your vehicle will likely never quite yield the dust no matter how you try to clean. Alkali sticks to oil, and frankly the entire world seems to be coated with a film of oil even if you don’t notice. I took a tent, and I brought it back to the Ozarks and put it in a clear flowing stream for hours, but it was still coated with dust when it dried.

I took a garden sprayer, the kind you pump up to spray. I used that to shower off (you must have a tarp to catch the water or you will violate a rule not to drain water in the desert). Although I sometimes raced naked to the water truck with soap in hand. Your wet feet will cake up like a baked potato when you walk back, but it peels off.

Don’t be ashamed to pee in a wide mouth jug at night and walk it to a porta-potty naked in the morning. No one cares.

If you are in the front row during a big temple or “man” burn, it will get hot and you may feel trapped at the front. The spiraling hot white tornadoes that come out of the big burns will not reach you although they seem to be coming out toward the crowd.

People swept through and stole bicycles on the last night, so beware there are sociopaths who will take your bike if you don’t lock it. I felt embarrassed to keep locking my bike the second time I went, but I kept mine while others lost theirs.

If you want to stay in touch with friends, bring walkie talkies. With all the people there, the channels are pretty crowded, but you can always take a radio with different bandwidth than family radio channels. Try buying some cheap marine radios or radios used on industrial worksites with UHF. Hell, CB might work too.

Take a hand drum of some sort so you can participate in drum circles. Irish tams are like big tambourines and travel well. Bring gifts—any kind. I took gallons of mixed nuts and little paper bowls which I filled and left (a few) at all the bars from which I drank. All drinks are free, so you want something to give back.

Carry a pen and little spiral notebook. You may meet people you want to look up later. You may never see them again at the Burn.

Video cams are frowned up. You are there to make art, not to collect pics of naked people.

I think of Burning Man as a combo of a circus, Fellini movie, and a gay parade. You’ll never forget it. I will be at Lake Powell starting Labor Day weekend on a houseboat—the perfect experience after the Burn (although I am not going this year). Diving into deep clean water will never feel so exquisite.

A reader and pilot, JP, sends a scenic view “from the cockpit of a Bell 206 Jetranger Helicopter, flying southeast bound along Clark Fork River heading back to Missoula, MT.” Here’s a little about the waterway:

The largest river by volume in Montana, the Clark Fork drains an extensive region of the Rocky Mountains in western Montana and northern Idaho in the watershed of the Columbia River. The river flows northwest through a long valley at the base of the Cabinet Mountains and empties into Lake Pend Oreille in the Idaho Panhandle. The Clark Fork is a Class I river for recreational purposes in Montana from Warm Springs Creek to the Idaho border. The Clark Fork should not be confused with the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River, which is located in Montana and Wyoming.

That striking photo from JP checks another state, Montana, off our list of 50. We still need aerial views from CT, GA, ID, IN, IA, ME, MS, NV, NM, ND, RI, TN, VT, and WV if you can help: hello@theatlantic.com.

Anne Woods, the reader who sent the crisp, cerulean view of Puako Reef, sends a second photo from the air, this time above Northern California’s Sonoma County on an afternoon in late November:

It was taken while bundled up in an open-cockpit 1932 Waco UBF-2. Off the wingtip is Tomales Bay, under which runs the San Andreas Fault. Point Reyes National Seashore is just on its other side, under the fog. When the sun swings south in the fall, it bathes the earth and the Waco’s wings in a soft, glowing light. The sky flushes orange, the summer-brown grass greens, the air stills, and on this day, I could smell the gap between the temperature and dew point closing. Pure heaven, accessible only by air.

I love America by Air! Here’s a submission above Puako Reef, on the Big Island of Hawaii, taken from a Piper PA-18 Super Cub.

Anne Woods

The healthy and beauty of the reef is precarious right now. From the North Hawaii Newsearly this year:

The Puako coral reef has provided food, recreation and beauty for many generations. So when residents began to see the coral degrade — a loss of 50 percent between 1970 and 2010 and several studies showed dangerously high bacteria count — they decided it was time to care for the reef. The community came together and launched the Clean Water for Reefs project in Puako in Sept. 2014. It soon became apparent that the major culprit was outdated waste water treatment such as cesspools, and that upgrading to a septic tank, given the porous volcanic rock and high ground water, was not a viable option. …

[T]he final recommendation was for an on-site waste water treatment plant. A big advantage to the on-site waste water treatment plant is that the water coming out of it would be safe to use for irrigation, making a “community orchard” a real possibility.

As winters grow warmer in North America, thirsty ticks are on the move.

We found the moose calf half an hour in. He lay atop thin snow on a gentle slope sheltered by the boughs of a big, black spruce, curled up as a dog would on a couch. He had turned his long, gaunt head to rest against his side and closed his eyes. He might have been sleeping. The day before, April 17, 2018, when the GPS tracker on the moose’s collar stopped moving for six hours, this stillness had caused both an email and a text to alert Jake Debow, a Vermont state field biologist who stood next to me now with Josh Blouin, another state biologist, that moose No. 75 had either shucked his collar or died.

“You want pictures before we start?” Debow asked me. He’s the senior of the two young biologists, both still in grad school, both in their late 20s, young and strong and funny, from families long in the north country, both drawn to the job by a love of hunting and being outside. Debow had always wanted to be a game warden; in college, he “fell in love with the science.” His Vermont roots go back 10 generations. “Jake Debow,” Josh told me, “is about as Vermont as you can get.” It was Debow’s second season on the moose project, and Blouin’s first. This was the sixth calf, of 30 collared, that they’d found sucked to death by ticks this season. They were here to necropsy the carcass, send the tissues to a veterinary pathology lab in New Hampshire, and try to figure out as much as possible about how and why these calves were dying.

The Bulwark is on a mission to name and shame President Trump’s most high-status supporters.

Charlie Sykes is sitting behind a desk in a sparse, disheveled office—blank walls lined with empty filing cabinets, windows covered with crooked blinds—as he tries to conjure the perfect metaphor for The Bulwark, the anti–Donald Trump conservative news site he recently helped start.

“We are the ultimate wilderness!” he declares to me.

But that doesn’t sound quite lonely enough for the political niche they’re occupying, so he tries again: “We’re on a desert island.”

Sykes continues to riff like this in his chirpy, midwestern accent, comparing The Bulwark’s writers to a band of “Somali pirates,” and then to a contingent of “guerrilla fighters.” He’s so enthusiastic about the exercise that before long I am tossing out my own overwrought suggestions. Perhaps, I muse at one point, they are soldiers on the final front of the Republican Civil War—making one last stand before the forces of Trumpism complete their conquest.

For several months, Cara has been working up the courage to approach her mom about what she saw on Instagram. Not long ago, the 11-year-old—who, like all the other kids in this story, is referred to by a pseudonym—discovered that her mom had been posting photos of her, without prior approval, for much of her life. “I’ve wanted to bring it up. It’s weird seeing myself up there, and sometimes there’s pics I don’t like of myself,” she said.

Like most other modern kids, Cara grew up immersed in social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were all founded before she was born; Instagram has been around since she was a toddler. While many kids may not yet have accounts themselves, their parents, schools, sports teams, and organizations have been curating an online presence for them since birth. The shock of realizing that details about your life—or, in some cases, an entire narrative of it—have been shared online without your consent or knowledge has become a pivotal experience in the lives of many young teens and tweens.

“Intuitive eating” encourages people to eat whatever they want. It might be great advice.

In 2016, Molly Bahr changed her whole life with a Google search. Bahr, a therapist, was at a professional training on eating disorders when a speaker mentioned in passing that participants might be interested in something called intuitive eating. Bahr looked up the term. “I went home that day, and it was like a light switch,” she says. “I felt like I got hit by a truck.”

Bahr decided she wanted to spread the word about intuitive eating, but there was one problem. Up to that moment, she had been dedicated to traditional ideas of dieting and health, encouraging followers on her growing fitness-focused Instagram account to weigh their food, watch their nutritional macros, and fret over their weight as a primary indicator of their health. Intuitive eating, on the other hand, is a theory that posits the opposite: Calorie-counting, carb-avoiding, and waistline-measuring are not only making people emotionally miserable, but contributing to many of the health problems previously attributed to simple over-eating.

A significant minority seldom or never meet people from another race, and they prize sameness, not difference.

Most Americans do not live in a totalizing bubble. They regularly encounter people of different races, ideologies, and religions. For the most part, they view these interactions as positive, or at least neutral.

Yet according to a new study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic, a significant minority of Americans do not live this way. They seldom or never meet people of another race. They dislike interacting with people who don’t share their political beliefs. And when they imagine the life they want for their children, they prize sameness, not difference. Education and geography seemed to make a big difference in how people think about these issues, and in some cases, so did age.

Though it was clear long before this week’s hearings that there was serious fraud in the Ninth District, testimony produced a series of astonishing disclosures.

The decision came after a dramatic day, during a dramatic hearing, in a dramatic race. North Carolina election officials on Thursday ordered a new election in the state’s fraud-tainted Ninth Congressional District, the only 2018 U.S. House race that still doesn’t have a winner.

The contest between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready appeared to have been decided, albeit by a small margin, in Harris’s favor on election night. Now voters will remain without congressional representation until a new election can be held, following shocking revelations of a brazen scheme to break the law and swing the election using absentee ballots.

The hearing, originally scheduled to last one day, was well into its fourth when Harris abruptly called for a new election. “Through the testimony I’ve listened to over the past three days I believe a new election should be called,” he said. “It has become clear to me that the public’s confidence in the Ninth-District seat general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted.”

I was one of many people who found Jussie Smollett’s story a little off from the beginning. Two white men in ski masks are out in 10-degree weather in the middle of the night, equipped with a bottle of bleach or something like it and a rope that they fashioned into a mock noose. These thugs, who shouted Trump slogans as well as racist and homophobic slurs, seemed to know who Smollett was on sight, meaning they were aficionados of the splashy black soap opera Empire, on which Smollett is a main character. Somehow they were aware that Smollett, prominent but hardly on the A-list as celebrities go, was gay.

Yes, my skepticism made me feel a little guilty. We are justly sensitized to violence against people for being black and for being gay in the wake of incidents I need not name. We are also just past watching legions of people who should have known better refuse to credit Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Maybe fear and trauma distorted Smollett’s memory somewhat? Maybe the media were getting some of the details wrong? Wait and see, I and others thought.

Long ago, it could have required the president to meet certain requirements priorto unlocking this broad authority.

Who empowered President Donald Trump to declare that “a national emergency exists at the southern border of the United States”? Congress. Congress authorized such sweeping authority. Congress failed to impose meaningful constraints or define “national emergency.” Congress is failing to maintain accountability by abiding by its six-month mandatory reviews of such emergencies. And it is Congress that has the power to terminate Trump’s proclamation by a joint resolution of both chambers of Congress. According to recent reports, the House is going to introduce a joint resolution to do just that on Friday. The Senate would need to sign on. But since the president can veto this joint resolution, both chambers will need a two-thirds majority—an unlikely scenario in this political climate.

Can Roma nab Best Picture? Will A Star Is Born be snubbed? Here are The Atlantic’s predictions for the 91st Academy Awards.

However dramatic Sunday’s Academy Awards presentation might prove to be (safe prediction: not very), it will be all but impossible for the ceremony to match the turmoil of its run-up. Last summer, the Academy announced that it would add a new prize for “popular” film—a trulyterrible idea—only to reverse itself within a month. In December, days after being announced as the host, Kevin Hart stepped down after furor erupted over a series of nearly decade-old homophobic tweets and jokes. (Prepare yourselves: The last time the ceremony went without a host, in 1989, is widely considered the worst Oscars ever.) Then word came out that, to streamline the broadcast, the Academy would feature renditions of only two of the nominees for Best Original Song, and would present some significant technical awards, including Best Cinematography, during commercial breaks. Both plans were also quickly reversed.

How do you offer intelligence to a president who’s not interested—and keep your job?

Dan Coats was nervous. Ahead of his very first threat briefing to Congress nearly two years ago, he was having trouble keeping straight what he could say in the unclassified part and what he had to save for the classified portion. He had retired from the Senate just months before—now he’d been thrust into an entirely different kind of job as the director of national intelligence. In the words of one former colleague, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, he was a “fish out of water,” horrified that he might get something wrong.

What he wasn’t worried about, this person said, was the kind of conflict with the president that erupted after his most recent threat briefing this past January, when he and other intelligence officials gave testimony on issues like North Korea, Iran, and Russia that contradicted statements Trump has made. Trump’s lingering anger about that testimony, ahead of his upcoming North Korea summit, has now revived speculation that Trump might fire Coats. But what Coats wanted to do two years ago, and by many accounts has faithfully tried to do since, was represent the views of the intelligence community to a president not always inclined to hear them. That is at once the key requirement of his job and potentially the one that puts him in the most peril.

As winters grow warmer in North America, thirsty ticks are on the move.

We found the moose calf half an hour in. He lay atop thin snow on a gentle slope sheltered by the boughs of a big, black spruce, curled up as a dog would on a couch. He had turned his long, gaunt head to rest against his side and closed his eyes. He might have been sleeping. The day before, April 17, 2018, when the GPS tracker on the moose’s collar stopped moving for six hours, this stillness had caused both an email and a text to alert Jake Debow, a Vermont state field biologist who stood next to me now with Josh Blouin, another state biologist, that moose No. 75 had either shucked his collar or died.

“You want pictures before we start?” Debow asked me. He’s the senior of the two young biologists, both still in grad school, both in their late 20s, young and strong and funny, from families long in the north country, both drawn to the job by a love of hunting and being outside. Debow had always wanted to be a game warden; in college, he “fell in love with the science.” His Vermont roots go back 10 generations. “Jake Debow,” Josh told me, “is about as Vermont as you can get.” It was Debow’s second season on the moose project, and Blouin’s first. This was the sixth calf, of 30 collared, that they’d found sucked to death by ticks this season. They were here to necropsy the carcass, send the tissues to a veterinary pathology lab in New Hampshire, and try to figure out as much as possible about how and why these calves were dying.

The Bulwark is on a mission to name and shame President Trump’s most high-status supporters.

Charlie Sykes is sitting behind a desk in a sparse, disheveled office—blank walls lined with empty filing cabinets, windows covered with crooked blinds—as he tries to conjure the perfect metaphor for The Bulwark, the anti–Donald Trump conservative news site he recently helped start.

“We are the ultimate wilderness!” he declares to me.

But that doesn’t sound quite lonely enough for the political niche they’re occupying, so he tries again: “We’re on a desert island.”

Sykes continues to riff like this in his chirpy, midwestern accent, comparing The Bulwark’s writers to a band of “Somali pirates,” and then to a contingent of “guerrilla fighters.” He’s so enthusiastic about the exercise that before long I am tossing out my own overwrought suggestions. Perhaps, I muse at one point, they are soldiers on the final front of the Republican Civil War—making one last stand before the forces of Trumpism complete their conquest.

For several months, Cara has been working up the courage to approach her mom about what she saw on Instagram. Not long ago, the 11-year-old—who, like all the other kids in this story, is referred to by a pseudonym—discovered that her mom had been posting photos of her, without prior approval, for much of her life. “I’ve wanted to bring it up. It’s weird seeing myself up there, and sometimes there’s pics I don’t like of myself,” she said.

Like most other modern kids, Cara grew up immersed in social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were all founded before she was born; Instagram has been around since she was a toddler. While many kids may not yet have accounts themselves, their parents, schools, sports teams, and organizations have been curating an online presence for them since birth. The shock of realizing that details about your life—or, in some cases, an entire narrative of it—have been shared online without your consent or knowledge has become a pivotal experience in the lives of many young teens and tweens.

“Intuitive eating” encourages people to eat whatever they want. It might be great advice.

In 2016, Molly Bahr changed her whole life with a Google search. Bahr, a therapist, was at a professional training on eating disorders when a speaker mentioned in passing that participants might be interested in something called intuitive eating. Bahr looked up the term. “I went home that day, and it was like a light switch,” she says. “I felt like I got hit by a truck.”

Bahr decided she wanted to spread the word about intuitive eating, but there was one problem. Up to that moment, she had been dedicated to traditional ideas of dieting and health, encouraging followers on her growing fitness-focused Instagram account to weigh their food, watch their nutritional macros, and fret over their weight as a primary indicator of their health. Intuitive eating, on the other hand, is a theory that posits the opposite: Calorie-counting, carb-avoiding, and waistline-measuring are not only making people emotionally miserable, but contributing to many of the health problems previously attributed to simple over-eating.

A significant minority seldom or never meet people from another race, and they prize sameness, not difference.

Most Americans do not live in a totalizing bubble. They regularly encounter people of different races, ideologies, and religions. For the most part, they view these interactions as positive, or at least neutral.

Yet according to a new study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic, a significant minority of Americans do not live this way. They seldom or never meet people of another race. They dislike interacting with people who don’t share their political beliefs. And when they imagine the life they want for their children, they prize sameness, not difference. Education and geography seemed to make a big difference in how people think about these issues, and in some cases, so did age.

Though it was clear long before this week’s hearings that there was serious fraud in the Ninth District, testimony produced a series of astonishing disclosures.

The decision came after a dramatic day, during a dramatic hearing, in a dramatic race. North Carolina election officials on Thursday ordered a new election in the state’s fraud-tainted Ninth Congressional District, the only 2018 U.S. House race that still doesn’t have a winner.

The contest between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready appeared to have been decided, albeit by a small margin, in Harris’s favor on election night. Now voters will remain without congressional representation until a new election can be held, following shocking revelations of a brazen scheme to break the law and swing the election using absentee ballots.

The hearing, originally scheduled to last one day, was well into its fourth when Harris abruptly called for a new election. “Through the testimony I’ve listened to over the past three days I believe a new election should be called,” he said. “It has become clear to me that the public’s confidence in the Ninth-District seat general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted.”

I was one of many people who found Jussie Smollett’s story a little off from the beginning. Two white men in ski masks are out in 10-degree weather in the middle of the night, equipped with a bottle of bleach or something like it and a rope that they fashioned into a mock noose. These thugs, who shouted Trump slogans as well as racist and homophobic slurs, seemed to know who Smollett was on sight, meaning they were aficionados of the splashy black soap opera Empire, on which Smollett is a main character. Somehow they were aware that Smollett, prominent but hardly on the A-list as celebrities go, was gay.

Yes, my skepticism made me feel a little guilty. We are justly sensitized to violence against people for being black and for being gay in the wake of incidents I need not name. We are also just past watching legions of people who should have known better refuse to credit Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Maybe fear and trauma distorted Smollett’s memory somewhat? Maybe the media were getting some of the details wrong? Wait and see, I and others thought.

Long ago, it could have required the president to meet certain requirements priorto unlocking this broad authority.

Who empowered President Donald Trump to declare that “a national emergency exists at the southern border of the United States”? Congress. Congress authorized such sweeping authority. Congress failed to impose meaningful constraints or define “national emergency.” Congress is failing to maintain accountability by abiding by its six-month mandatory reviews of such emergencies. And it is Congress that has the power to terminate Trump’s proclamation by a joint resolution of both chambers of Congress. According to recent reports, the House is going to introduce a joint resolution to do just that on Friday. The Senate would need to sign on. But since the president can veto this joint resolution, both chambers will need a two-thirds majority—an unlikely scenario in this political climate.

Can Roma nab Best Picture? Will A Star Is Born be snubbed? Here are The Atlantic’s predictions for the 91st Academy Awards.

However dramatic Sunday’s Academy Awards presentation might prove to be (safe prediction: not very), it will be all but impossible for the ceremony to match the turmoil of its run-up. Last summer, the Academy announced that it would add a new prize for “popular” film—a trulyterrible idea—only to reverse itself within a month. In December, days after being announced as the host, Kevin Hart stepped down after furor erupted over a series of nearly decade-old homophobic tweets and jokes. (Prepare yourselves: The last time the ceremony went without a host, in 1989, is widely considered the worst Oscars ever.) Then word came out that, to streamline the broadcast, the Academy would feature renditions of only two of the nominees for Best Original Song, and would present some significant technical awards, including Best Cinematography, during commercial breaks. Both plans were also quickly reversed.

How do you offer intelligence to a president who’s not interested—and keep your job?

Dan Coats was nervous. Ahead of his very first threat briefing to Congress nearly two years ago, he was having trouble keeping straight what he could say in the unclassified part and what he had to save for the classified portion. He had retired from the Senate just months before—now he’d been thrust into an entirely different kind of job as the director of national intelligence. In the words of one former colleague, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, he was a “fish out of water,” horrified that he might get something wrong.

What he wasn’t worried about, this person said, was the kind of conflict with the president that erupted after his most recent threat briefing this past January, when he and other intelligence officials gave testimony on issues like North Korea, Iran, and Russia that contradicted statements Trump has made. Trump’s lingering anger about that testimony, ahead of his upcoming North Korea summit, has now revived speculation that Trump might fire Coats. But what Coats wanted to do two years ago, and by many accounts has faithfully tried to do since, was represent the views of the intelligence community to a president not always inclined to hear them. That is at once the key requirement of his job and potentially the one that puts him in the most peril.